If you put more than 4 holes in your chainmail, call your doctor immediately.

Always be suspicious of people who have, or crave, power. - Stanley Kubrick
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants." - Albert Camus

I'm buying "The Waif killed Arya" theory.
If we suppose the faceless men and their many faced god (who is called death?) have an agenda regarding the coming war with the dead:
Arya is the vehicle to King Jon and the army of men.
Why Jaqen H'ghar allowed himself to be captured.
Why Arya is able to shape shift even after leaving the House of Black and White and forsaking the many faced god.
Why Nymeria rejected Arya.

In addition to the points MJ raised: why would the waif have killed Walder Frey and his family?

Sudden thought occurred to me, while I was in the middle of doing something completely unrelated to Game of Thrones, or thinking about same: I think the simplest explanation for Arya's strange behavior lately (especially in not-yet-officially-aired episode 6, though I won't go into more detail for fear of spoiling it for people waiting for the official Sunday airing) is this: really shitty writing.

Remember last season, when Arya decided to leave the Faceless Men and then openly strolled around Braavos until she ended up getting stabbed in the gut? And many of us here wonder why Arya would be that stupid, and were positing theories like "Hmm, maybe that wasn't really Arya, but a Faceless Man testing the Waif" or "Maybe that was part of Arya's clever-secret plan, to make the Faceless Men think she had been stabbed to death and thus there was no point in any Faceless continuing to go after her" or things like that? Nope; turned out to just be shitty writing for that episode.

"Myself, despite what they say about libertarians, I think we're actually allowed to pursue options beyond futility or sucking the dicks of the powerful." -- Eric the .5b

Dude. No one uses that shit. My pharmacy is crazy busy and the vast majority of plans don't cover the generic. It's almost always viagra itself thanks to the manufacturer discounts. I think we do about 8k Rx's a month and around 10 are sildenafil.

The lack of 10-episode seasons is really starting to show in the last two episodes.

"How do we get a dragon in danger north of the wall?"

"I don't know man, I'm too busy imagining an alt-history where the confederates won the Civil War. Can't we just have, like, a bunch of characters go on some fool's errand to be rescued/bait a trap or something?"

"Yeah, whatever, we could drop a terminator in this motherfucker and people will still watch it and justify it..."

It feels both too rushed and too slow. I think going north to kidnap a zombie soldier was a good idea (how else can they try convincing people in the south that the walking dead are a real threat?), and thus having the dragons go north to save Jon 7 Co. worked, but they spent too much of that episode on that. Meanwhile, Arya the Trumpster is wasting time ranting about Sansa's emails, I dunno what that scene with Sansa discovering Arya's cache of faces is supposed to accomplish, and I wish they'd just kill off Littlefinger already because his pointless Machiavellian plotting is getting boring.

"Myself, despite what they say about libertarians, I think we're actually allowed to pursue options beyond futility or sucking the dicks of the powerful." -- Eric the .5b

One thing that undeniably sucked about this latest episode ws the timeline, though. With previous episodes this season, it could be possible that "Okay, Euron's travels took only two minutes of screentime, but it actually took him many days or even weeks in Westerosi time," but unless message-ravens and Dany's dragons fly at supersonic speeds, I don't buy that she was able to get that "help us" message in Dragonstone and fly up in time to save the day, all while Jon and his plucky band of adventurers were surrounded by ice-zombies.

Another thing that's bothered me a bit all this season: why hasn't Cersei's hair grown noticeably longer? Hair grows about half an inch a month, and given how very short her hair was after the religious fanatics hacked it off, even an inch or two of growth would be noticeable. How much time passed between the "walk of shame" and her grabbing the throne for herself? How much time has passed since then?

"Myself, despite what they say about libertarians, I think we're actually allowed to pursue options beyond futility or sucking the dicks of the powerful." -- Eric the .5b

It's just a coincidence, right, that καλλίστῃ -> kallisti is close to Khaleesi ? As Khaleesi is a femine form of Khal which is a play off of Khan from the Mongolian/Turkic language families - and not at all indo-european like a greek to english thru line would be?

when you wake up as the queen of the n=1 kingdom and mount your steed non sequiturius, do you look out upon all you survey and think “damn, it feels good to be a green idea sleeping furiously?" - dhex